For years since Donald Trump came on the political scene, the Democrat left has preached to the country that one thing matters above all others: the preservation of democratic norms. It was the theme of the campaigns, the cable panels, the op-eds, the fundraising emails. Democracy was on the ballot. Democracy was under siege. Democracy was the sacred thing Trump threatened and they alone would defend.
But a new survey from the Center for Strategic Politics that asked self-identified liberals how they would feel about various ways Trump might leave office early gave answers that suggest the commitment was never to democracy. It was to a result – getting rid of Trump one way or the other.
Start with the parts that are merely politics. Eighty-seven percent would welcome impeachment and removal. Eighty-four percent would feel good about his Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment. Those are constitutional mechanisms, and people are entitled to root for them. Fine.
Then the floor gives way. Fifty-five percent said they would feel positive if the president simply died in his sleep. But it gets even worse. Fifty-nine percent, a clear majority, said they would feel positive if American military leaders removed him and took control of the country. Forty-three percent picked the strongest positive answer available. Read that again: a military junta seizing the United States government, and the dominant liberal reaction is approval. Does that sound like “defenders of democracy” to you?
And then comes the part that should end every conversation about which side has a violence problem: Thirty-two percent said they would feel positive if Trump were assassinated at a rally. Nearly a quarter said very positive. Only 43 percent said they would feel negative about it. The rest shrugged.
This is not a hypothetical question about some distant figure. Two years ago, a gunman on a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, came within an inch of doing exactly that, at exactly that kind of event. A volunteer firefighter died shielding his family. The scenario these respondents found appealing already happened once, and a man is dead because of it.
None of this came from nowhere. Last year the Network Contagion Research Institute documented what its founder, Joel Finkelstein, called an emerging assassination culture on the left, with open justification and even celebration of political violence against Trump and Elon Musk spreading online. Cheering the killer of a health insurance executive. Excusing arson as protest. Treating opponents as fascists, and fascists as people it’s permissible to stop by any means. Tell people for a decade that the other side is an existential threat to the country, and don’t be shocked when they start thinking like people facing an existential threat.
Here is the standard conservatives should hold, and insist Democratic leaders hold too: no American should welcome the violent death or military overthrow of an elected president. Not this one, not the last one, not the next one. That’s not a partisan position. It’s the minimum requirement for a self-sustaining democratic republic.
So the question for every elected Democrat who has spent years invoking “our democracy” is simple. Will you denounce these numbers, specifically and by name? Their silence will be its own answer.
